Amid Hurricane Sandy, a Race to Get a Liver Transplant

It was the best possible news, at the worst possible time.

The phone call from the hospital brought the message that Dolores and Vin Dreeland had long hoped for, ever since their daughter Natalia, 4, had been put on the waiting list for a liver transplant. The time had come.

They bundled her into the car for the 50-mile trip from their home in Long Valley, N.J., to NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children?s Hospital in Manhattan. But it soon seemed that this chance to save Natalia?s life might be just out of reach.

The date was Sunday, Oct. 28, and Hurricane Sandy, the worst storm to hit the East Coast in decades, was bearing down on New York. Airports and bridges would soon close, but the donated organ was in Nevada, five hours away. The time window in which a plane carrying the liver would be able to land in the region was rapidly closing.

In a hospital room, Natalia watched cartoons. Her parents watched the clock, and the weather. ?Our anxiety was through the roof,? Mrs. Dreeland said. ?It just made your stomach into knots.?

The Dreelands, who are in their 60s, became Natalia?s foster parents in 2008 when she was 7 months old, and adopted her just before she turned 2. They have another adopted daughter, Dorothy Jane, who is 17.

Natalia is a ?smart little cookie? who loves school and dressing up Alice, her favorite doll, her mother said. At age 3, Natalia used the word ?discombobulated? correctly, Mr. Dreeland said.

Natalia?s health problems date back several years. Her gallbladder was taken out in 2010, and about half her liver was removed in 2011. The underlying problem was a rare disease, Langerhans cell histiocytosis. It causes a tremendous overgrowth of a type of cell in the immune system and can damage organs. Drugs can sometimes keep it in check, but they did not work for Natalia.

In her case, the disease struck the bile ducts, which led to progressive liver damage. ?She would have eventually gone into liver failure,? said Dr. Nadia Ovchinsky, a pediatric liver transplant specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian. ?And she demonstrated some signs of early liver failure.?

The only hope was a transplant.

Dr. Tomoaki Kato, Natalia?s surgeon, knew that the liver in Nevada was a perfect match for Natalia in the two criteria that matter most: blood type and size. The deceased donor was 2 years old, and though Natalia is nearly 5, she is small for her age. Scar tissue from her previous operations would have made it very difficult to fit a larger organ into her abdomen.

Though Dr. Kato had considered transplanting part of an adult liver into Natalia, a complete organ from a child would be far better for her. But healthy organs from small children do not often become available, Dr. Kato said. This was a rare opportunity, and he was determined to seize it.

But as the day wore on, the odds for Natalia grew slimmer. The operation in Nevada to remove the liver was delayed several times.

At many hospitals, surgery to remove donor organs is done at the end of the day, after all regularly scheduled operations. The Nevada hospital had a busy surgical schedule that day, made worse by a trauma case that took priority.

At the hospital in New York, Tod Brown, an organ procurement coordinator, had alerted a charter air carrier that a flight from Nevada might be needed. That company in turn contacted West Coast carriers to pick up the donated liver and fly it to New York.

Initially, two carriers agreed, but then backed out. Several other charter companies also declined.

Mr. Brown told Dr. Kato that they might have to decline the organ. Dr. Kato, soft-spoken but relentless, said, ?Find somebody who can fly.?

Dr. Kato used to work in Miami, where pilots found ways to bypass hurricanes to deliver organs. Even during Hurricane Katrina, his hospital performed transplants.

?I asked the transplant coordinators to just keep pushing,? he said.

Mr. Brown said, ?Dr. Kato knew he was going to get that organ, one way or another.?

As the trajectory of the storm became clearer, one of the West Coast charter companies agreed to attempt the flight. The plan was to land at the airport in Teterboro, N.J. The backup was Newark airport, and the second backup was Albany, from where an ambulance would finish the trip.

The timing was critical: organs deteriorate outside the body, and ideally a liver should be transplanted within 12 hours of being removed.

Early Monday, as the storm whirled offshore, the plane landed at Teterboro. Soon a nurse rushed to tell the Dreelands that she had just seen an ambulance with lights and sirens screech up to the hospital. Someone had jumped out carrying a container.

At about 5 a.m., the couple kissed Natalia and saw her wheeled off to the operating room.

Three weeks later, she is back home, on the mend. The complicated regimen of drugs that transplant patients need is tough on a child, but she is getting through it, her father said.

Recently, Mr. Dreeland said, he found himself weeping uncontrollably during a church service for the family of the child who had died. ?Their child gave my child life,? he said.

Though only time will tell, because the histiocytosis appeared limited to Natalia?s bile ducts and had not affected other organs, her doctors say there is a good chance that the transplant has cured her.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/health/amid-hurricane-sandy-a-race-to-get-a-liver-transplant.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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AP IMPACT: NYC flood protection won't be easy

This June 2001 photo made available by the Texas Medical Center shows Texas Children?s Hospital workers standing at glass doors holding back floodwaters caused by tropical storm Allison in Houston. The floods caused a massive blackout, inundated medical center streets with up to 9 feet of water, and forced evacuations of patients from the district's 6,900 hospital beds. The campus sustained more than $2 billion in damage. If metropolitan New York is going to defend itself from surges like the one that overwhelmed the region during Superstorm Sandy, decision makers can start by studying how others have fought the threat of fast-rising water. (AP Photo/Texas Medical Center)

This June 2001 photo made available by the Texas Medical Center shows Texas Children?s Hospital workers standing at glass doors holding back floodwaters caused by tropical storm Allison in Houston. The floods caused a massive blackout, inundated medical center streets with up to 9 feet of water, and forced evacuations of patients from the district's 6,900 hospital beds. The campus sustained more than $2 billion in damage. If metropolitan New York is going to defend itself from surges like the one that overwhelmed the region during Superstorm Sandy, decision makers can start by studying how others have fought the threat of fast-rising water. (AP Photo/Texas Medical Center)

This undated photo made available by the Texas Medical Center shows submarine type flood doors which were installed throughout the Texas Medical Center tunnel system in Houston after severe flooding from tropical storm Allison in 2001. The floods caused a massive blackout, inundated medical center streets with up to 9 feet of water, and forced evacuations of patients from the district's 6,900 hospital beds. If metropolitan New York is going to defend itself from surges like the one that overwhelmed the region during Superstorm Sandy, decision makers can start by studying how others have fought the threat of fast-rising water. (AP Photo/Texas Medical Center)

This June 9, 2001 photo from the Houston Chronicle made available by the Texas Medical Center shows flooding from tropical storm Allison in front of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The floods caused a massive blackout, inundated medical center streets with up to 9 feet of water, and forced evacuations of patients from the district's 6,900 hospital beds. If metropolitan New York is going to defend itself from surges like the one that overwhelmed the region during Superstorm Sandy, decision makers can start by studying how others have fought the threat of fast-rising water. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Inside tunnels threading under a Houston medical campus, 100 submarine doors stand ready to block invading floodwaters. Before commuters in Bangkok can head down into the city's subways, they must first climb three feet of stairs to raised entrances, equipped with flood gates. In Washington, D.C., managers of a retail and apartment complex need just two hours to activate steel walls designed to hold back as much as a 17-foot rise in the Potomac River.

If metropolitan New York is going to defend itself from surges like the one that overwhelmed the region during Superstorm Sandy, decision makers can start by studying how others have fought the threat of fast-rising water. And they must accept an unsettling reality: Limiting the damage caused by flooding will likely demand numerous changes, large and small, and yet even substantial protections will be far from absolute.

Sandy's toll is overwhelming. But finding the money and political will to build a proposed system of giant storm barriers at the mouth of New York Harbor will likely be very difficult. Even at a cost of up to $27 billion, such barriers would leave large parts of the region unprotected.

So government, businesses and property owners will need to consider taking smaller steps ? on land ? to minimize the impact of flooding, with or without sea barriers.

The good news is that many cities have already learned much about how to limit the damage from floods. Researchers are working on still other strategies, like 16-foot-wide inflatable plugs being developed at West Virginia University to seal off subways and tunnels from water.

But there's no single cure-all.

"You really have to go with a series of levels of protection. You can't just buy into one engineer's dream of building" a 5-mile-long barrier for New York Harbor, said Phil Bedient, a flood expert at Houston's Rice University whose research was key to shoring up that city's defenses after it was swamped by Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. "So you have to pick your spots carefully. And you really can't protect everything."

Sandy's destruction in the New York area highlights a host of weaknesses that must be addressed, experts said. But the region's size, density and geography will complicate the task.

"It's hard to predict what's going to happen, where it's going to happen and what magnitude, and that leads to a quandary of what makes sense to do," said William Coulbourne, a Delaware structural engineer specializing in flood plain design and construction. "New York City is unique in the number of people who live there, the age of the buildings, that it's on islands and it's a hub of U.S. commerce."

That could force people to make trade-offs they might have been unwilling to consider before Sandy. When city officials met with real estate and construction industry representatives starting in 2008 to look at making New York buildings more environmentally efficient, the conversation included whether to move flood-prone electrical equipment out of basements in apartment buildings and office towers to higher floors, said Rohit "Rit" Aggarwala, former director of the city's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

"One of the people from the real estate industry said, 'Rit, you're crazy. That's rentable space up on those floors,' Aggarwala said. "That's the problem of thinking in the near-term of losing revenue vs. the long-term certainty of needing it."

Now New York needs a wide-ranging discussion, considering not just how to limit damage to high-rise districts like lower Manhattan that are critical to the region's function, but about whether and how to rebuild in residential neighborhoods along the shoreline, said Larry Buss, a recently retired hydrologic engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers who for many years led its committee on non-structural flood proofing.

"If you're thinking long-term," said Buss, who worked with communities along the Gulf of Mexico to build flood resilience after Hurricane Katrina, "you've got to use all the tools in your toolbox."

In the search for answers, few places may offer as many lessons as Houston's Texas Medical Center campus, which is bisected by a bayou and was swamped by intense rains in a 2001 storm. When Ed Tucker, the center's senior vice president of planning and development, watched televised footage of rescuers carrying critically ill patients down the darkened stairwells of New York hospitals during Sandy, he was struck by a terrible thought: He had seen it all before.

The floods in Houston caused a blackout, inundated medical center streets with up to 9 feet of water, and forced evacuations of patients from the district's 6,900 hospital beds, some airlifted from rooftops by helicopter. The campus sustained more than $2 billion in damage.

"Allison was a significant event for us and fortunately we learned a lot," Tucker said.

A review of the area's flood weaknesses led officials to create a list of 112 projects, including widening the bayou and building culverts that funnel water away from the campus. But many of the projects were based on acknowledging that even if planners couldn't ensure that all the water from a future storm would stay out, they could at least work to limit the damage.

TMC's member hospitals moved their electrical vaults and backup generators out of basements to areas above flood level. They rejiggered the way they used their space, rebuilding and moving facilities like research labs, many of which were destroyed by the flood, to higher floors. Scores of existing buildings were fitted with flood gates, and new buildings were built surrounded by berms. Underground tunnels were outfitted with 100 submarine doors, some 12 feet tall. The bill was $756 million, paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not including millions more spent on the public works projects.

Variants of some of those flood mitigation measures could be put to work in New York, experts said, with a focus on protecting the infrastructure and centers of activity critical to its function.

? SUBWAYS AND TUNNELS: Sandy exposed the weaknesses of the 108-year-old subway system, including the large number of stations in flood-prone neighborhoods and the overall porosity of a network ventilated by thousands of grates set into sidewalks.

In recent years the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the system, has begun looking for ways to defend it from water. After flooding from a 2007 storm forced closure of part of the system, the agency spent $157 million on a host of projects, including one that closed half the 1,600 grates along a low-lying avenue in Queens, raised others and installed water-activated mechanical closing devices on still more. It also hired an architecture firm to design raised grates that double as street furniture.

But those changes were designed to prevent flooding caused by rain, not storm surge, and were limited by a capital budget with little room for projects not directly related to transportation, said Projjal Dutta, the MTA's director of sustainability initiatives.

"Sandy just upped that bar hugely," Dutta said. The agency is studying how subway systems elsewhere protect themselves from floods, including some that have installed gates or built drainage tunnels. But the MTA has not reached a decision on how to move forward, and hardening the system against a surge like Sandy's will require significant additional funding, he said.

While New York is designing raised entrances for a new subway line, it is far behind newer systems, like Bangkok, where most station entrances are raised several feet above street level.

Defending the system from a major flood will likely require numerous changes to seal off its many entry points. One answer could come from researchers at West Virginia University, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, who are developing inflatable plugs to seal off underwater tunnels in case of a breach.

A 16-foot-wide prototype was tested in the Washington, D.C., Metro system in 2008, with highly pressurized smoke proving its ability to seal off a tunnel with irregular contours, said Ever Barbero, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at West Virginia who developed the plug. Barbero said plugs, which could be made to varying sizes, could also be used to seal highway tunnels like the ones that flooded in New York.

After New York was hit by Sandy, "I told my co-workers we have our work cut out for us for the next 20 years," Barbero said.

The subway system would be a particular challenge, requiring flood gates, plugs or some other closure at thousands of vulnerable openings.

"A technology like this might be useful to plug certain points but it certainly is not an end-all, be-all answer to everything," said Dave Cadogan, director of engineering for Frederica, Del.-based ILC Dover, which has a contract to manufacturer the plugs. He and Barbero estimate they are still a couple of years away from marketing the plugs, with ones similar to the prototype likely to sell initially for about $400,000.

? ELECTRIC GRID: With Sandy pounding the coast, New York power supplier Con Edison preemptively shut down three networks serving parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to prevent damage to equipment. But widespread outages were prolonged after a 14-foot surge inundated the utility's 13th Street substation, swamped critical gear located just over 11 feet above sea level, and caused an explosion. Also, above-ground lines in New Jersey and New York were taken down by falling trees.

Moving or shielding key components of the electrical distribution system would alleviate such problems, but that will be more challenging in New York then in other areas of the country, said Carol J. Friedland, a civil engineer at Louisiana State University who has studied wind and flood damage.

After hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike hit the Gulf Coast, some utilities elevated substations above the flood line. SLEMCO, a cooperative serving Southwest Louisiana, rebuilt three substations, raising them 13 feet above sea level, at a cost of $6.6 million. But all three substations were in a rural area, where a shortage of space, a premium on river views and construction noise are not at issue.

"As long as you have sky above, you should be able to go up. Now whether the neighbors would appreciate it, now that's a horse of a different color. That's where I think you all would have issues" in New York's dense neighborhoods. "It all comes down to what is your priority," said Mary Laurent, the Louisiana utility's communications director.

The protection afforded by elevation was demonstrated at Con Edison's World Trade Center substation. Sandy's surge infiltrated the substation, located in the base of an office tower, but never reached the critical equipment 12 feet above sea level, the company said. That enabled the utility to maintain power for the Battery Park City neighborhood even as the water rose.

Moving more power lines below ground would offer protection from storm damage, said Roger Anderson, a Columbia University research scientist specializing in smart electrical systems. But it is very expensive. A 2009 report by the Edison Electric Institute estimated installing lines underground in urban areas could cost up to $23 million per mile, five times the cost of lines above ground.

Anderson, a proponent of undergrounding, said that in the meantime comparatively small changes in infrastructure ? including installation of hand pumps at gas stations that normally rely on electricity to bring fuel up from underground tanks and the use of rubber seals on electrical relay boxes that may be exposed to water ? could improve the region's storm resilience.

The region's utilities might also do more to break their distribution networks into more localized "microgrids," letting them limit outages to smaller areas, said Bill Zarakas of The Brattle Group, a Cambridge, Mass.-based economic consulting firm specializing in the electric power and utility industries.

"Humans are not good at seeing the future if it hasn't yet happened to you, and once they see that, there's some easy solutions," Anderson said.

? PROTECTING NEIGHBORHOODS: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some Wall Street companies sped up efforts to move their back office operations away from lower Manhattan, protecting them by decentralizing. But most of that relocation has been done, and with the industry's strong attachment to New York, a renewed exodus is unlikely, said Mark Gibson, who leads Ernst & Young's construction and real estate advisory services practice.

That leaves it to employers, landlords and government officials to figure out how to make the area more flood-resistant, perhaps by drawing on examples like the work done at Houston's medical campus. Engineers said the city could consider building an earthen berm around Battery Park. Individual building owners could investigate installing steel flood gates or fitting building opening with flood doors.

But retrofitting existing buildings won't always work. "Once you look at how water can get in ... then you have to calculate the flood loads and determine whether or not a building can accommodate those loads," said Christopher P. Jones, a Durham, N.C., coastal engineer who works on flood-resistant design. "There will be many cases, I'm sure, where flood-proofing the building will not be practical."

One possibility is to erect site-specific gates around building perimeters. When the Potomac River rises, managers of the Washington Harbour complex in Georgetown, in the nation's capital, can raise a series of 17-foot steel panels from concrete pockets underground. The panels, which cost about $1 million in 1983, have been raised more than 50 times since their installation, architect Arthur Cotton Moore said. The gates worked each time until an April 2011 flood, when operators failed to raise all of the panels fully, swamping some restaurants in 10 feet of water.

Since even the largest gates have limits, it's at least as important to rethink how the city and its buildings can be redesigned to accommodate flooding and minimize damage, engineers said. New York building owners should reshuffle the way they use space in buildings, moving backup generators, electrical vaults and switches and computer systems out of basements and limiting ground floors to use as lobbies. The city building code could be revised to require such design changes.

"You can't make New York City climate proof; what you can do is make New York City more adaptable," said Cas Holloway, the city's deputy mayor for operations.

But surrendering the city's 539-mile coastline is not an option, he added. "''We're not going to be pulling back or away from the water or retreating from the water."

___

AP National Writer Jeff Donn and AP researcher Julie Reed contributed to this report.

___

The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-11-26-Superstorm-Protecting%20The%20Land/id-fd60372ee0c24fa1810a710d4ccba720

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5 Best Corporate Team Building Activities | Kid Billy Music

Posted on November 27, 2012 ?

A client called last week and asked me to recommend a great corporate team building activity to follow up on the music team building we did for his company last year. I love repeat customers, but I also sincerely understand the desire to do something different. The most important thing for me is long term relationships and seeing my clients succeed in their goals.

The Pragmatic Dreamer

Many people consider me to be a dreamer and a risk taker. I consider myself to be pragmatic and fairly conservative when it comes to risk. You have to look below my surface to reconcile the outward image with the inward approach.

• Outwardly: I?m a lifelong musician who opted for music studies and making music, rather than college. I?m a hit songwriter who spent years telling stories through music and making a great living at it. I?m a mid-life entrepreneur who got a crazy idea about?a great corporate team building activity with music, and created a sustainable business around it.
• Inwardly: I hesitate to make change and take risks so I do lots of research and consider the down side to every decision I make. I arm myself with knowledge and I seek the counsel of those more experienced than myself. I embark on long journeys equipped for the turbulence that will surely come. And I know that no matter how bad any given day is; tomorrow will bring a fresh sunrise. I always act ?despite my fears?, rather than act to ?avoid my fears?.
• The Differences Reconciled: My desire to achieve overcomes my fear of failure. I mitigate risk but then I take the risk to achieve a desired goal. In short, I?m setting myself up to succeed.

Team Building as Catalyst

If you?re still reading this, thank you so much. Thanks for assuming my digression above would tie back into my introductory statement about the best corporate team building activities. And I hope to repay your patience now?

?Team Building succeeds only when your goals are aligned with the amount of time you?re willing to commit to the activity. If you view team building as a risk, then you need to mitigate the risk with planning. You need commitment to the follow up that will help you succeed.

A half day team building program can be a wonderful catalyst to change. It can boost engagement and set the tone for better team work, retention and efficiency. But real change requires sustained effort. I offer our team building program as a catalyst to change. So for me, the best corporate team building is provided by folks who know how to encourage, inspire and support your desire to improve your organization?s culture. If you?re willing to have that discussion, then these folks below will be great resources for you.

Source: http://kidbillymusic.com/blog/5-best-corporate-team-building-activities/

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NZ Olympic success spurs interest in grass roots sport | Kerikeri Rugby

New Zealand?s success at the London Olympic and Paralympic Games looks to be driving a surge of interest in those sports codes here at home.

Sport NZ Chief Executive Peter Miskimmin says many sports are anecdotally reporting an increase in numbers or membership enquiries in the aftermath of the London Games, including athletics, rowing, cycling, canoe and yachting.

?We saw a surge in football interest after the 2010 World Cup and the same thing happened with Rugby in 2011. Now it?s London?s turn," he said.

?We know that seeing our sporting heroes succeed on the world stage can motivate people, young and older, to give those sports a go, and that?s what we?re seeing now.

Rowing is a good example. We?re hearing that clubs across New Zealand are putting out more novice crews than last year. For example, the Taupo Rowing Club, which had been going through lean times, now has lots of new rowers on the water. That?s great news.?

Miskimmin says the same thing is happening in athletics, with one Wellington club reporting membership figures in some categories that are 50% higher than at the same time last year.

?It seems too that Lisa Carrington?s gold medal has inspired lots of young people to try canoe racing, just as Ian Fergusson and Paul MacDonald did in their time.?

?Likewise Yachting New Zealand tells us that the presence of Olympians like Jo Aleh and Polly Powrie at regattas and open days around the country has drawn big crowds, with many wanting to try sailing for the first time. And the same sort of thing happened when Sarah Walker and Alison Shanks turned up at a Dunedin BMX Club event recently. That club now has almost double the members it had last year.?

Miskimmin says it?s a real credit to our Olympians that they?re prepared to share their success and be such great role models.

?This surge of interest in grass roots sport shows the real value of winning Olympic medals, and is why the Government invests in high performance sport. Winning Olympic medals gives us a real sense of national pride at the time. But it also motivates people to get out and try sports themselves, which is a valuable legacy. That means we have more people involved in sport and recreation, and have a bigger pool of future champions.

"That?s why Sport NZ and our sector partners work hard to ensure the pathway is there to take the emerging stars through to being our next winners on the world stage.?

-- Media Release via Sport New Zealand

Source: http://kerikerirugby.com/2012/nz-olympic-success-spurs-interest-in-grass-roots-sport/

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New Mexican leader: Economic gains will cut crime (CNN)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

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Analysis: Stifel CEO puts reputation on line with KBW buy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Over the past seven years, Stifel Financial Corp Chief Executive Ronald Kruszewski has impressed Wall Street with a series of acquisitions that quintupled the regional brokerage's revenue and rewarded shareholders with a nearly four-fold increase in returns over the last five years.

Still, some investors view Kruszewski's latest deal, to buy money-losing investment bank KBW Inc , as a much riskier proposition. Some question the wisdom of spending $575 million to build out a middle-market investment banking business at a time when tougher financial regulations are posing a threat to profits of giants such as UBS AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Moreover, after years of expansion, Stifel's board is starting to worry that Kruszewski may be overextended. Before announcing the KBW deal on November 5, the board was mulling whether to appoint a senior administrator or president to help him run the company, according to one director. Kruszewski is currently chairman and president, as well as chief executive.

"We talk about him moving too fast, and whether we have the infrastructure to move as fast as we're moving," said Robert Lefton, a psychologist who has been on Stifel's board for 20 years.

But he stressed that the board supported the KBW deal and was very happy with Kruszewski, who has been CEO for 12 years and is Stifel's largest individual shareholder with a 1.6 percent stake worth more than $26 million.

"He has a very clear sense of where he's heading," Lefton said. "When he came aboard, we were a struggling little regional firm barely eking out a living. He has put together what he told us he would."

Another board member echoed Lefton's comments. "Even if there is a modest recovery, (KBW) will be a very smart acquisition because he bought it off the bottom," said Robert Grady, a Stifel director and former Carlyle Group partner. "I wouldn't bet against him."

Kruszewski, 53, has said he wants to better balance revenue between the St. Louis-based company's retail and institutional brokerages. The deal to buy KBW, which specializes in advising small banks and thrifts on mergers and capital-raising, takes him closer to that goal.

If he succeeds, Stifel will be able to compete with Jefferies Group Inc - whose market value is twice Stifel's $1.6 billion - to raise money for companies with revenue of $100 million to $1 billion. Big banks like Goldman and Morgan Stanley largely ignore this middle-market segment.

Unlike Kruszewski's previous acquisitions, KBW brings complex integration issues. Stifel already has dozens of bankers, analysts and salespeople serving financial companies, so employees are worried that the merger could bring job cuts.

"He is already pretty exposed to the institutional securities business, and ... financial services is not a great business right now," said Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Douglas Sipkin. "He is a very smart guy, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

In addition, money managers who trade through both Stifel and KBW do not want to pay twice for research and other products, so parsing the benefits of the merger becomes difficult.

"To distinguish between the two from Stifel's business perspective is going to be tricky," said Mark Kuzminskas, director of equity trading at Robeco Investment Management.

In an interview, Kruszewski defended the KBW deal, and said it and the 2010 purchase of Thomas Weisel Partners, which specializes in banking for technology companies, are core components of his middle-market corporate strategy.

"I'm not predicting that next year is going to be a blowout year for financial companies, but I'm not being reckless," he said. "Institutional (brokerage) is much more cyclical and, of course, you take a lot more risk. It is also a high profit-margin business when things are working."

Investors do not appear to be convinced. At Monday's close, Stifel shares had declined 2.9 percent this year, compared with an uptick of 1.1 percent for the NYSE Arca Securities Broker/Dealer Index.

CRAFTY NEGOTIATOR

Kruszewski, the son of a fireman from South Bend, Indiana, has an accounting degree and, according to people who have worked with him, a steel-trap mind for absorbing new data and translating it into action.

He demonstrated discipline earlier this year, passing on the acquisition of Morgan Keegan from Regions Financial Corp because the price was too high, Lefton said. Raymond James Financial Inc later purchased the Tennessee-based brokerage.

"At the beginning of every year, I have no idea what we'll do," Kruszewski said. "Strategic planning is for people who have too much time on their hands. Our plan is to be in a position to take advantage of opportunities."

KBW was one such opportunity. The company had lost more than $60 million since the financial crisis of 2008 and was cutting 15 percent of staff. It was also weighing radical changes in its operations after another down year for financial services deals and capital-raising, a person close to KBW said.

Kruszewski drove a hard bargain. He required about 95 key employees to waive change-of-control clauses that would have let them sell their shares, and he compelled them to sign noncompete agreements. He also won control of $250 million of cash on KBW's balance sheet to help finance the cash-and-stock transaction.

You never want to negotiate against that man," said Scott McCuaig, the retired president of Stifel Nicolaus, the company's principal brokerage subsidiary. "He gets his hands dirty and works deals until they come to fruition. Nobody is going to snooker him."

(Reporting by Jed Horowitz and Olivia Oran; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Steve Orlofsky)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-stifel-ceo-puts-reputation-line-kbw-buy-181032927--sector.html

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98% Brooklyn Castle

All Critics (43) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (42) | Rotten (1)

"Brooklyn Castle" easily checkmates your inner cynic.

Katie Dellamaggiore's lively and affecting documentary introduces us to a cast of characters that's very winning (in both senses of the word).

It's not To Sir, With Love: It's fierce ambition, the channeling of emotion, and hours of drilling.

Enlightening, inspiring and expertly crafted.

An irresistibly uplifting doc.

Castle is suspenseful, funny and, particularly in its depiction of the challenging home lives of some of the kids, moving.

...provides a corrective to the popular image of American schools as obsessed with sports and popularity, and it makes the strongest possible case for funding after-school activities.

Chess, brilliant young students and great teachers potent mix.

The I.S. 318 team? A delightfully motley, vulnerable, multicultural bunch, whose addiction to chess has allowed them higher aspirations for top high schools and, eventually, college and careers. You will root for them like crazy.

We meet five of the team's members and several of their teachers; by its end, you'll be rooting for them all.

"BROOKLYN CASTLE is a compelling, engaging and inspiring Documentary, featuring Junior High kids that you can relate to. Even if you don't know the game of Chess all too well, it won't stop you from enjoying this pleasant film."

Brooklyn Castle provides a snapshot of indomitable American can-do attitude, and gives one hope.

The admirable Brooklyn Castle transcends its formula to become an optimistic look at extracurricular education and young people.

Great story, well-made, what's not to like?

It's clear that chess isn't just a game; for these students, it can also open doors.

The film's structure is routine, but the film doesn't sidestep its more serious issues, while its charming subjects make it a winner both on and off the chessboard.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/brooklyn_castle_2012/

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